911 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions

911 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions Review

By Christopher Null

Normally I wouldn't review a conspiracy film like this, but despite its many groaners and outrageous accusations, there might be a teeny tiny germ of truth to be found here and there in 911 Mysteries Part 1: Demolitions.

The title of the film ought to tip you off as to what director Sofia Shafquat feels happened on 9/11: That the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives in the building, which no one ever saw, rather than the giant aircraft that crashed into the towers, which everyone did see.

For a full hour and a half Shafquat lays out the various theories as to why the World Trade Center towers couldn't have come down the way they did if they were hit by a plane. The buildings came down too quickly. Jet fuel can't burn hot enough to melt steel. Puffs of smoke coming out of the windows indicate explosive charges. Seismographs and audio recordings catch explosion-type sounds before the collapse. And something fishy was going on in the building the weekend before the collapse, with dust puffed up all over the place.

Interesting theories, but common sense alone refutes most of them. For starters, despite showing dozens of buildings collapsing due to demolitions, starting at the bottom and going up, none of them look anything like the WTC collapse, which clearly proceeds from the top down. Shafquat vaguely explains this by saying they must have been using explosives so advanced and complicated that even demolitions experts don't understand them completely. And, you know, if hundreds of workers did load up the WTC with several tons of explosives and dozens of miles of wiring over the course of one weekend, wouldn't a security camera somewhere in Lower Manhattan caught this on tape? Anywhere? Or maybe someone would have seen some evidence of this aside from dust? And how big of a crew would that have took? Not one confession amongst them?

Meanwhile, the melting of the roadway near Oakland's Bay Bridge in a regular gas fire a few months ago has proven rather succinctly that yes, fire can melt steel, even a relatively small one.

Other parts of the film, such as a deep inquisition into how the underground WTC foundation could have been damaged stretch credibility to its limits. Maybe the force of 110 storeys falling on top of it made it crack a little? Ya think?

Where Shafquat raises interesting questions is in her examination of WTC 7, which indeed had a much different collapse and which looks like it could indeed have been caused by explosions instead of peripheral damage from the other buildings. The footage of the BBC announcing its collapse well before it actually went down is intriguing, too. Of course, no one died in the WTC 7 collapse, so no one really cares much about it. It went down hours after the initial strike.

Also of interest is the possible motive for bringing down the WTC buildings: Financially troubled, there's a case to be made for major monetary gain in blowing them up just to make an insurance claim.

Academic stuff, in the end. 911 Mysteries is too wrapped up in its own theories to actually consider the ones that might hold water. While Shafquat has a few interesting points here and there, there's so much dreck surrounding them that it's impossible to consider her as anything other than a garden-variety nut. Can't wait for part 2!